Green-Clawed Beast of Evansville

On a hot summer afternoon in August 1955, Naomi Johnson, her best friend Louise Lamble, and Johnson’s three children, Darrell, Darwin and Sandra, went to the Ohio River near Evansville, Indiana, for a cooling swim, according to the paranormal site Anomalien. The children stayed on the river bank while Johnson, a strong swimmer, swam out and Lamble followed with an inner tube.

About fifteen yards off shore, Lamble was pulled underwater. She surfaced gasping for air and said something had been pulling her under, then went under again before she finally worked herself free. Johnson came back to the bank with her leg scratched from knee to ankle and covered in bluish mud. When medical help was summoned, they couldn’t clean off a bluish stain on her leg, which reportedly took several days to fade.

Nobody got a good look at what attacked Johnson, but she reported that it had a green scaled body and hairy three clawed hands. She later claimed a U.S. Air Force officer visited her and warned her not to speak of what had happened, and she said the thing that attacked her looked like “one of those little green men.” Anomalien notes that much of the story seems to have grown over the years as the children who watched from the bank retold it.

Stronghold Nation tells a different version. In it, a family sunbathing next to the Ohio River saw a “strange, Human-like Creature” rise from the water and try to snatch the children. It was said to be “6-foot and having scales,” with long green claws. The family escaped to their car and reported it to local police, who laughed, then investigated and found what appeared to be “large webbed footprints” in the mud on the bank. Still thinking it was a prank, the police watched the area for several weeks, and no further reports were made.

The sources don’t agree on the date, either. Wikipedia’s list of urban legends gives 14 August 1955, and Anomalien gives August 21, 1955.

Stronghold Nation says many people think the release of the then-popular Creature from the Black Lagoon was behind the sightings. Anomalien calls the case a real event that was misinterpreted and then exaggerated by years of retelling. The Ohio River has a deadly undertow that may have pulled Johnson underwater, the river bottom is littered with cast-off fishing line and other debris, and the blue stain on her leg was tested and shown to be mud from deep caves beneath the river, probably stirred up by boat traffic or other natural underwater movement.

On January 26, 2014, the Destination America series Monsters and Mysteries in America covered it in an episode titled “Green-Clawed Beast, Big Muddy Monster, Ohio Grassman,” in which “a mother is viciously attacked in a river by the Green Clawed Beast.”